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The Microbiome and Antibiotic Resistome in Soil under Biodegradable Composite Carbon Source Amendment
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Adding biodegradable plastic-based carbon sources to soil for denitrification altered microbial communities and, concerningly, reduced the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes in some conditions while changing nitrogen metabolism pathways. The findings suggest that biodegradable microplastics released during this process interact with the soil microbiome in complex ways, with implications for both water treatment effectiveness and antibiotic resistance spread.
The decomposition of biodegradable composite carbon sources generates a large amount of biodegradable microplastics, which may not only furnish microbial denitrification, but might also pose potential environmental risks. In the present study, the effects of different dosages of a biodegradable composite carbon source on the microbial communities, the nitrogen metabolic pathways and the antibiotic resistome were explored through Illumina MiSeq sequencing analysis and metagenomic analysis. The results of partial least-square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and analysis of similarity (ANOSIM) demonstrated that the response of the bacterial community to a biodegradable composite carbon source was more obvious than the fungal community. The application of biodegradable microplastics diminished the complexity of the microbial communities to some extent and obviously stimulated denitrification. Antibiotics resistance gene (ARG) dispersal was not evidently accelerated after the addition of biodegradable composite carbon source. Lysobacter, Methylobacillus, Phyllobacterium, Sinorhizobium, Sphingomonas from Proteobacteria and Actinomadura, Agromyces, Gaiella and Micromonospora from Actinobacteria were the major ARG hosts. Overall, the addition of a biodegradable composite carbon source shaped microbial communities and their antibiotic resistance profiles in this study.
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